Science and the Media Girls sweep first Google Science Fair, with eldest winning $50,000 Story reported prominently in New York Times “Science Times” Jul 19, 2011 By Steven T. Corneliussen Google recently processed more than 7500 Web-submitted science fair entries from more than 10000 students in 91 countries, and selected 15 finalists who assembled in Silicon Valley earlier this month for final judging. Girls won in all three age categories. As Fox News reported at the time: In the 13-to-14 age group, Lauren Hodge won for her project studying varying carcinogen levels in grilled chicken — depending on sauce type. In the 15-to-16 age range, Naomi Shah tried to prove that tweaking the environment indoors can improve air quality and lessen people's reliance on asthma medication. The Grand Prize winner (and winner in the 17-to-18 age group) was Shree Bose, who found a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs. Now the New York Times ’s Kenneth Chang, writing in the “Science Times” section, has given the story prominent coverage at the top of an inside page, complete with a photo of the three smiling, trophy-holding winners. Chang’s opening seems worth quoting: As a budding inventor and scientist, Shree Bose, in second grade, tried to make blue spinach. In fourth grade she built a remote-controlled garbage can. In eighth grade she invented a railroad tie made out of recycled plastic and granite dust, an achievement that got her to the top 30 in a national science competition for middle school students. In 11th grade Ms. Bose, a 17-year-old in Fort Worth, tackled ovarian cancer, and that research won her the grand prize and $50,000 in the Google Science Fair last week. For the winning research Ms. Bose looked at a chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, that is commonly taken by women with ovarian cancer. The problem is that the cancer cells tend to grow resistant to cisplatin over time, and Ms. Bose set out to find a way to counteract that. She found the answer in a cellular energy protein known as AMPK, or adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. She observed that when AMPK was paired with cisplatin at the beginning of treatment the combination diminished the effectiveness of cisplatin. But added later on, when the cancer cells were growing resistant, the AMPK worked to maintain the effectiveness of cisplatin, allowing it to continue killing the malignant cells, at least in cell cultures. Besides the $50000 scholarship, Bose won science trips to the Galápagos Islands and to CERN, the European particle-accelerator laboratory. Nine of the 15 finalists were boys. Chang calls the sweep by girls “a contrast to generations past when women were largely excluded from the science world.” Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science , and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory. Reply to the anonymous "No Apology": Maybe I should have followed up on my original temptation to make this media report a bit longer by quoting the following paragraph from the Times: QUOTE Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the judges, said that gender did not play a role in deciding the winners. “This was a gender-neutral evaluation of all the work that was done,” he said. Nonetheless, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen,” Dr. Cerf said. “This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.” UNQUOTE True, that could be lip service, but it shows that Change knew that people would wonder about gender favoritism in the judging, or even in the framing of the whole thing. My own view, obviously, is that it'd be a shame to cheat a boy if his work was really superior, but that in a world where girls can still have acid thrown in their faces for going to school, it's great for science to set an example of rationality where it can. I cheer for those three girls. And again I plug the photo (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/19/science/19goog/19goog-articleLarge.jpg), which will cheer all those who cheer along with me. Written by Steve Corneliussen, 21 July 2011 13:39 Reply to David Braun: I'm not qualified to elaborate (though I can watch for further news). In contributing these media reports for PT online's "Science and the media," I'm just alerting the physics community to actual articles that might merit attention. My sense, by the way, is that it wouldn't be hard to find more information on the Web, once you've read the Fox News and New York Times pieces that I excerpted. Written by Steve Corneliussen, 21 July 2011 13:37 How gender-sensitive of the judges, to award all three prizes to girls. Oh, and two are even green fat-free projects. Hogwash. And David Braun is exactly right: no way, no how could this girl have conducted such a scientific study, as is implied here. Just ridiculous. Written by No Apology, 20 July 2011 15:14 According to the description "at least in cell cultures", I assume the students did not involve in human case study. Nevertheless I have no doubt about the scale and integrity, not to mention resources and money, for those kind of research is far beyond high school level. Written by itsagooday, 20 July 2011 12:24 This article implies that the winner conducted actual clinical research, rather than a retrospective cohort study (which would have examined existing records). How could a high school student legally and ethically conduct such research? If it was a cohort study, the article should be corrected. But, even it was a cohort study, how did the student legally and ethically get a sufficient sample of records to do the study? Either way, the detailed story needs to be told. Please elaborate. Written by David Braun, 19 July 2011 20:02
标签: 女生
